I’ve been trying to get the hang of my new Canon 70-200 f/2.8L, so I brought that along. The lake was completely frozen over, with people ice skating at the far end. We took a walk through the woods, and on our way back stopped on the snow covered beach. Here there were 3 lifeguard towers with signs on them indicating that there were no lifeguards and swim at your own risk. I tried to get some shots of the three towers in a line, but just couldn’t capture anything that seemed interesting. Then, I came along the sign that said “Unguarded Waterfront” with a lifeguard tower, frozen lake, and snow-covered beach behind it. It just seemed somewhat ironic and amusing to me.

I was shooting aperture priority mode (Av) at f/3.2 because I wanted the sign in clear focus with the background blurry, but still slightly identifiable. As it turns out, I am kicking myself for not trying something with a smaller aperture, as the sign on the lifeguard tower is completely indecipherable. If I went back, I’d probably choose f/8 so that the background was a little more identifiable. Because I was shooting a primarily snow-covered scene, I dialed in a slight bit of exposure compensation (EV) – +1/3 stop. Camera meters take what they see and assume that the entire scene would average out to be 18% neutral gray. This is normally a decent assumption and is one of the many reasons why 18% gray cards are used frequently by photographers. Snow isn’t even close to 18% gray – it’s like…2% gray, especially in sunlight. If I were to shoot with no exposure compensation, I’d end up with an underexposed scene because the camera would try to make the snow into gray. I usually have to play with the exposure compensation value a bit to get it right, but as a rule of thumb, when taking pictures of bright snow, bump the EV up a bit, and if taking a picture of your black cat, lower it a bit.

When I downloaded the images last night, I was drawn to this photo. I like the humor of it and I like the way it is framed. What I don’t like, as I mentioned above, is that I chose too shallow a depth of field, so you don’t really know what’s behind the sign. If I had picked something more like f/8 or so, I think the humor would have shined through better.

Here you see the original image, straight out of the camera and imported into Adobe Lightroom. It’s pretty boring. Almost no color, with little texture in the snow, and no contrast in the wood grain. So, I went to work on it. In Lightroom, I adjusted the white balance to 7100K by using the white balance eyedropper tool and selecting the white of the sign. I usually shoot in Auto White Balance mode when I’m shooting in RAW simply because I can easily adjust it later. With JPG, you don’t have as much latitude there. I bumped up the exposure by +1/4 stop and increased the clarity and contrast some. I also set the tone curve to “Strong contrast”. I knew I would be bringing this into Photoshop and sharpening it there, so I lowered the sharpening in Lightroom to 0.

Then, I exported it to Photoshop CS4. There, I applied a very strong unsharp mask to the Lightness channel in LAB Mode. This pulled a lot of texture out of the wood without creating halos and odd colors. I also applied a technique used in a few of my other images (as in the one shown here) where I duplicated the background layer, desaturated it, and set the blend mode to Overlay with about a 60% opacity. This has the effect of really kicking up the contrast and making a dull image pop a lot more. The reason for the desaturation is otherwise, you end up altering the colors of the image as well. I also did a slight crop of the image, removing the fence visible in the bottom of the frame, and did some slight adjustment with a levels layer – moving the middle slider to the left to increase contrast. Finally, I added a saturation layer and lowered the saturation of the image by about -50. This had the effect of making it almost black and white, but not quite. Then, I saved it, and exported it to Flickr from Lightroom with medium sharpening.

That was a lot of editing for a mediocre photo, but I’m fairly happy with the way it came out. I’m always trying to stretch myself creatively and in this case I think I had a partial success in doing something slightly out of my normal comfort zone of landscapes.

Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!

First up, a lion in the snow!

Being winter in New England, there were very few animals outside, but we were quickly greeted by an earth shaking lion’s roar. As we approached, the guy you see here was standing on top of his rock, as if to tell us that we would be food if he could only get out of his pen. If you’ve never heard a lion’s roar live in concert, it is quite a thing to experience. Plus, the juxtaposition of a lion with a foot of packed snow on the ground was equally unusual.

Mr. Lion was kept in by two different types of barricades. On two sides, he had an extremely deep and wide sheer rock chasm. This provided us photographers with a nearly unobstructed view of the King of the Jungle. On the other sides, he was glassed in with very thick, contrast reducing, flare inducing glass.

The shot above was taken through thick, scratched glass as he was staring me down. It was difficult to capture him through the branches, but I stood on my tip-toes and leaned against the glass and was able to get a clear shot of his face. As usual, I was shooting aperture priority (Av) mode, which allowed me to chose my f/stop and ISO while the camera chose the shutter speed. In this case, I picked f/2.8 to get that nice shallow depth of field. Because I would be shooting moving animals with a long lens, I had to keep the shutter speed high. The rule of thumb is to keep the shutter speed no slower than 1/(effective focal length) to avoid shake blur from hand holding the camera. I chose ISO 200, which in this shot gave me a shutter speed of 1/1000″ – plenty fast enough to get a sharp image, hand-held, at 200mm.

In order to avoid flare and reflections from the glass I was shooting through, I made sure to have the lens hood pressed up against the glass as close as possible. Even then, I could see a reflection coming in, so I used my left hand to block the source of the reflection. I took a number of similar shots to this, but tried to wait for the moment when he was staring me down. I focused on his eyes and recomposed the image so that he was not smack in the middle of the photograph. The rule of thirds always helps make for a better image.

Here is what came out of the camera. As you can see, the image is pretty sharp, but seriously lacking in contrast and color vibrance. The Lion is also somewhat back and side lit, causing his face to be a bit too dark and the background a bit too bright. The first thing I did in Lightroom was to bring up the black levels substantially (+30). This took care of the biggest problem, which was a lack of dark tones in the image. I tried a number of things to bring out the colors in the image, but they were just lost behind the glass. So, I converted the image to black and white. My philosophy is that if the colors in an image do not do anything to improve the image, get rid of them. Black and White also gives you the ability to greatly increase the contrast of an image, which I did in this case by setting the tone curve to “strong contrast” and bringing contrast up to +77.

I also did some messing around with the color luminosities to darken the rocks and bring out some detail in the lion’s face. This changed the image from a flat grayscale image to one with some more depth and contrast. That left me with the dark face to deal with. I used the adjustment brush set to +1 stop exposure and drew all over his face. Because the feathering level on the brush was set quite high, it doesn’t end up looking unnaturally brightened. I cropped the image a bit from the left, added a slight vignette, and then uploaded it to flickr.

This is more post processing work than I usually put into my images, but I think it paid off here. I don’t consider this my best work by far, but I think it shows what you can do with a decently composed, yet somewhat technically flawed image.

To finish up, I present you with this odd juxtaposition:

Let me know what you think or if you have any questions.

Next up, LEMURS, indoors!

The town was dead. Very few businesses in the very small town were open, and there was hardly a soul around. This was perfect for us since we hate crowds and all we wanted to do was spend some nice time together, go hiking, and generally just relax. I, of course, brought my camera everywhere we went.

One evening, while my wife was taking a nap, I went out to get some sunset shots at the marina right by our cabin. I spent a good hour or so waiting for the light to “happen”, but came back with nothing great. The lake is to the east, and the clouds weren’t crazy enough to provide an interesting sky in the east. So, the next morning, I decided I would get up at the crack of dawn – before first light, if possible – to get some sunrise shots of the marina. In my limited experience photographing sunrises, I’ve found that the light is far better than sunset light.

Something like 5AM came, I begrudgingly rolled out of bed, put on some warm clothes, grabbed my camera, tripod, filters, and remote trigger and walked down the hill to the lake. It was, unfortunately, well past first light, but the light was still beautiful. Since I had been there the night before, I had some ideas for compositions already, so I got to work.

I had decided on using my Sigma 17-70 lens since I knew I would want to take shots from a variety of focal lengths. I love my Sigma 10-20, but it’s not very easy to adapt to changing conditions and ideas since even 20mm on a crop camera is only 32mm, which doesn’t get you very close. It was pretty dim light, but the sky was still significantly brighter than the docks and water, so I put on a 2 stop graduated neutral density filter to bring the exposure of the sky down. Without it, I’d either have a shadowy foreground with little detail and a lot of noise, or I’d have a blown out sky. The color in the sky was a beautiful pastel color and I wanted to make sure I captured that. I didn’t have my gray card with me to custom white balance, but I was wearing a gray sweatshirt, so I turned the camera around and set a custom white balance using my sweatshirt. (Note to self, purchase an 18% gray t-shirt and sweatshirt).

I knew I wanted to get some long exposure shots in order to blur the water to a glass-like surface with frosty reflections of the dock, and I also wanted everything in clear focus. So, I chose f/11, ISO 100, and tried a 25 second exposure. I find that the light meter only gets me in the ballpark on shots like this, so there is a bit of guesswork involved to get the ‘correct’ exposure. I wanted to use the dock to lead the eye out into the lake, mountains, and those beautiful cloud wisps beyond, so I started the dock in the lower left corner, and brought it out to the middle of the image. I adjusted my height so that the sky took up a third of the image, and the water took up 2/3rds. The dock occupies 2/3rds as well. By now, you should be getting the fact that I like utilizing the rule of thirds to help compose my images. Centered images are boring (usually) and offsetting the subject matter does a great deal to bring interest to a photograph.

I set up my tripod (yeah, I know Ken Rockwell doesn’t like tripods – I’d like to ask him how to get shots like this without one), set the mirror lockup mode on, and took the shot using the settings above, and it came out just as I wanted. My histogram looked as you see here. Nothing was blown out, but it was nicely exposed all the way to the right, just as I wanted. The first thing I noticed was the incredible pastel yellow throughout the image. I loved it! The color actually came from some blue fibers that were woven into my “gray” sweatshirt that I had white balanced to.

[tangent]
The basic idea of exposing to the right, minus all the technical jargon is that you want to expose your shot so that it is as bright as possible without clipping off the highlights. Most cameras that show a histogram will flash clipped highlight areas when you display the histogram. The basic reason for this is that half of all the information the camera captures is in the brightest one stop of exposure. Conversely, the least amount of information is stored in the shadows. So, to get a noise-free image, expose it as far “to the right” as possible (without clipping) because you can always darken it in post processing, but recovering detail from the shadows is all but impossible.
[/tangent]

I moved around quickly as the sun was coming up fast – once the sun breaks the horizon, the game is over. The light is spoiled and it’s back to bed. I got 3 ‘keepers’ from the few dozen that I shot over a period of 30 minutes or so. It just so happens that they were the first 3 shots that I took! I find that happens frequently – my best images are often the ones that seem most intuitive. After I’ve gotten the shots that seem right and natural to me, I start looking too hard for other images to take and end up getting into analysis paralysis to some degree. This is especially prevalent with sunrise and sunset shots, as the light is constantly changing and you never know what is around the next temporal corner.

The sun came up, and I went back to the cabin, knowing I had a few keepers. I didn’t have my computer with me, so it would be another few days before I could download them. So, I did what any sane person who got up at 5AM on vacation would do…I went back to bed.

The final version of the first photograph I took that morning is the first image in this post and is the one I will be talking about further.

When I got back home a few days later, I downloaded the images. To the right is what came out of my camera. As you can see, the dock is a little darker than in the final image, the horizon is a bit crooked, and there is a beer can on the dock that I didn’t notice at the time, but other than that, there was very little editing required. I always try to do my best to get the shot as close to the way I want it in the camera since editing is not something I generally enjoy. I brought the RAW image into Adobe Lightroom and went to work. First, I straightened the image with the straight edige tool resulting in a -1.14 rotation. Try as I might, I can never get my horizons straight when I’m on the scene. I think I need to get a bubble level for my hotshoe. Then, I added +25 Fill Light, to bring up the brightness of the dock and mountains without adjusting the midrange and highlight tones, added +43 contrast, +43 clarity (to bring out some texture in the wood), and +17 Vibrance. I added a slight vignette to the image and did a tiny amount of sharpening, also in Lightroom. Because the beer can was so small and unobtrusive, I was able to avoid going into Photoshop, and I just used the dust removal tool in Lightroom to edit it out.

Hopefully, this gives you some idea of the how and why of creating this image. Questions? Ask in the comments section!

I set up with my Canon Rebel XTi, Sigma 10-20, a 2 stop hard edge graduated neutral density (GND) filter, my tripod, and my homemade remote shutter trigger and went to town. Every time I go out and shoot a sunset, I am reminded that I really wish I had a 3 stop GND filter, but I am able to make due with the 2 stop one plus a little bit of post processing. I wanted a long exposure, so I also added a polarizer into the mix which functioned as a neutral density filter since there was little polarized light shooting into the sun. I chose f/16 so as to get maximum depth of field.

To the left is one of the images that I started out with, before any processing.

I had purposely exposed to the right so as to make sure and not lose any shadow detail in any part of the image. Some people recommend underexposing sunset shots to get those vibrant colors, but I disagree. That’s fine if you only want silhouettes, but if you want to be able to see the foreground, you really must make the exposure as bright as possible. Remember, you can always darken a bright image (if it’s not blown out), but brightening a dark image will end up with a noisy turd. You can see from the histogram above that there is a tiny bit of the image that is blown out (it was a very small part of the sky) and most of the tones in the image are in the middle to high end. I shot in RAW (as I always do), planning on bringing the exposure down later. For me, RAW is always the way to go – not because I can “fix my screw ups” later – but because I can expose the image in such a way that I maximize the signal to noise ratio and can get great colors and skies. Ken Rockwell can go and tell me all day why I should be shooting JPG, but I understand the limitations of both and still pick RAW every day of the week. I’m glad it works for him, but RAW fits my workflow far better.

To the right is the image I ended up with after some Lightroom tweaks. Aside from some minor cropping and rotating (the horizon wasn’t level, despite my best efforts on site), I added a 1 stop software GND, increased vibrance and clarity, and added a small vignette. That’s about all.

Let me know what you think!